Month: September 2019

A New Year and a New Me

I am an oleh chadash, a new immigrant, here in Israel; but there’s something missing from that translation. An oleh is literally someone who ascends, and chadash means new. So I should really say, I am a newly ascended person, and not just a new immigrant.

When I was in the US, everyone that came to our shores was an immigrant, usually with something attached to that word that clarified their legal status. Often, it was whether they were documented or not, or whether they were a refugee, or whether they were actually only there for a temporary amount of time. I never used the term “new immigrant” for someone in the States, and I certainly never phrased their legal status in terms of physical ascension.

So why is it different here? The source of the word oleh is tied with the process of immigrating here, or making aliyah, both words describing going to a greater height, and the words have been used throughout Jewish history to describe things quite different than immigration. When a man is called to read the Torah, he is given an aliyah, and he often literally ascends from the ground floor where the parishioners sit to the bimah, the raised platform where the Torah is read. He is an oleh, he is someone who ascended to the Torah. When pilgrims would come to Jerusalem in the times of the Holy Temple, they would literally make aliyah, they would ascend to Mount Zion to offer sacrifices. Those pilgrims too were called olim. Today, when we say that someone is making aliyah, we are saying that he is ascending from the depths of the lands outside Israel to the heights of Zion. He rises from exile to the Holy Land.

But then there’s chadash. None of those people in the Bible were called “new,” and we don’t describe someone today as being a “new” oleh if it’s his first time being called to the Torah. It is a term uniquely Israeli, and one I don’t see a parallel for in the rest of the world from a legal perspective, at least not in the United States. No one would say that Miguel, or Mohammed, or Sven, or Jacques is a new immigrant after his first day in the country; but I am still “new” six months in.

I think it’s because we are creating here new Jews, Jews that think differently and behave differently than they ever could have outside of this land. As a people and as a nation, we are making strides here that are impossible in the rest of the world; but it is also deeply personal.

I am new. I can explore parts of my personality, my life, and my soul with new lenses. I can create goals for myself and grow in a way that I couldn’t have back in the States. Since I’ve been here, I’ve alternately felt like I just got here but that I’ve been here forever, that I am a different person but still the same in many ways. I know that when I go back to visit, I will never be able to be the man I once was. Life here changes you in ways that are incomprehensible and unexplainable. Just for an example: I feel completely at home here but I miss where I was from. I have a sense of homesickness in a place where my home always was. This is a land where there 70 faces to the truth, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. I feel like I can be myself here, but I am also painfully aware of how different I will always be. I feel the welcoming arms of strangers that see me as reunited kin, but at the same time I feel like a stranger in my own country. I feel like a refugee who fled from a place where I lacked for nothing to a home where I need to build everything. I am constantly confronted by the fact that I have gone up the the mountaintop, but that I feel like it is too strange for me to understand even though the mountain has always been mine.

So as this new year approaches, I want to bind my own personal novelty with the newness of this year. This is my first Rosh Hashanah in Israel, the start of my first year as someone who has returned. I’ve learned so much since I’ve been here, I’ve made amazing friends, and I’ve become a little more Israeli along the way. I still have so many dreams to fulfill, but I know that I must make goals to make those dreams more than just wishes and fantasies. I will need your help, and all I ask is for you to keep reading and maybe comment once or twice. If you feel like asking me to write about something ask, and please complain when I don’t write enough. I have a once in a lifetime chance to be new in a place greater than anyplace I have been before, and I don’t want to waste it.

May this next year only bring us good and sweet things, and in a revealed way. May we all increase in our love of one another, and all find love for ourselves. Shana Tovah y’all, see you in the year to come.

Why am I here?

Tomorrow is election day here in Israel. It’s a legal holiday, so government buildings are closed, public transport is free, and there is a general vibe of enjoying the day off after exercising your civic duty; but this election day is different. For the first time in Israeli history (which admittedly is only 71 years long), there will be a second election in the span of just a year after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government and dissolved the last Knesset. Since then, a temporary government holds the country together, but no major legislation has passed and nothing has really happened for months here as we grapple with the political deadlock. Polls indicate that tomorrow may not fare any better than last time, and we will have to wrestle again with neither the left or the right having enough mandates to hobble together to form a coalition. Two major political parties, Blue and White and Yisrael Beiteinu, are pushing for a secular unity government, the haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) parties Shas and United Torah Judaism are prophesying that this may be the end of religious life here in Israel, some going so far as to call members of the left Amalek, the people that G-d commanded the Jewish people to obliterate from the earth, and to the Nazis.

It’s not any less heated in the streets. At Ikea today, I saw a Shas billboard that advertised in Hebrew, showing a Shas ballot, “Your ticket on the Day of Judgement.” Everyone can palpably feel the tension in the air. Lacking a functioning government, or at least one without any real mandate from the public, is something I used to think was consigned to third-world dictatorships and the contentious democracies recovering from the Soviets or severe corruption. I ask different people, religious, secular, Jewish, not Jewish, what they think; and they’re all fed up. They’re fed up with political parties that hate them, or that they perceive to hate them, and they can’t understand how someone can have a different point of view. Either you’re a right-wing religious settler, a leftist terrorist-apologist, or you’re an Arab (a group that all of our parties, outside the Arab parties themselves see as at best a possible source of a few votes, or at worst a fifth column). No one wanted this election, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of shekels preparing for it (and it will really cost even more), and we’ve torn our country apart because a few men at the very top can’t come to an agreement; albeit, on an issue that strikes to the very core of what it means to live in a Jewish and democratic state.

So, given all of this tumult, why am I here?

It’s a good question, one that you have to preface with a lot of information and begs only more questions. It’s not just, why are you here? It’s:

Why are you there?

Why would you leave your home?

Why leave a good life?

Why would you leave your friends and family and journey across the ocean to a land you only know a week at a time?

How could you put yourself, and your wife, in danger of physical harm, financial turmoil, and the tumult of complete alienation in a world you have never known? Don’t you see the news about the rocket attacks? Don’t you remember the suicide bombings? The car rammings? The stabbings?

They said to us, “trust us, we’ve been there, we’ve lived there, why would you go when we fled?”

You don’t know the language. You don’t know how rude the people can be, how frustrating the bureaucracy is, how much you have to struggle to just stay afloat. You will never make as much money, you will never own a home; you may make it, but you will never belong.

So why am I here?

It’s easy to articulate the reasons why I should have stayed, but it’s near impossible to describe the reason I am here. It’s true, life here is hard, there is no getting around it. I live in the Middle East, in the middle of one of the most fought over areas of land in the entire history of the world. This place has been traded been back and forth between empires over epochs, it’s seen invaders and colonisers from every corner of the world. It’s still a scary place to live in, when you stop to think about it. The rail station right next to my ulpan, the school where Golda and I learn Hebrew, is named after eight victims of a nearby Hezbollah rocket attack from the 2006 Lebanon War. I can go on a tour to any major city in Israel and point to a spot where a Jew was murdered in our lifetimes because he or she was a Jew living in the State of Israel. As safe as you feel with all of the soldiers around, M16s or Tavors slinged on their shoulders, it doesn’t take away the fact that there’s a reason that they’re omnipresent, along with the armed guards at the malls, the museums, and even the bus stops.

I’m blessed to have found an apartment for a decent price in a neighbourhood that I love, but it’s not objectively the best place to live. I live in an apartment built with hundreds of others to rapidly absorb olim, immigrants from around the world. I can hear them speaking in Russian, Amharic, Spanish, and more when I go shopping at the grocery store. Food is cheaper for me, because I kept kosher back in the US, but life is more expensive here and salaries are lower. My building is old, there’s no elevator (I feel its absence every time I have to carry up a week’s worth of groceries up five flights of stairs), and I can generally feel the decades of its life as I walk around it.

Then there’s the language barrier. Nothing has been more frustrating and debilitating than not being able to express yourself. You completely take it for granted when you grow up in a place with only one language required and are forced to try and survive in a place with a tongue completely alien to your own. Sure, I knew how to read the prayers from the siddur, I knew enough phrases to keep up with a dvar torah in English, and I knew enough Hebrew phrases to spice up conversations whenever I travelled to Israel, but I never had to speak Hebrew. Part of what’s made me successful has been my ability to communicate, either as an attorney arguing in court, talking with clients, or networking; but it’s also the way that I’ve been able to really and intimately connect with people. I always thought that I could connect to someone because I really knew how to use my words, and I knew how to time it perfectly and make every word count in just the right way. Now, I have the Hebrew proficiency of a well-developed grade school student. I can engage in basic conversation and navigate the system, but it’s difficult to have more in-depth conversations. I thrive on complex and dynamic relationships, but those require a level of Hebrew I just don’t have yet. I used to measure my successes in conversation whenever I really changed someone’s life, now I feel great if I can give someone correct directions or answer everything clearly without the other person having to resort to broken English.

I had pretty much everything you could ask for back in the States. I had a car (G-d I miss my pickup truck), my wife and I had good jobs, and we never had to worry about where our next rent check was going to come from. I had enough money to put a down payment on a good home. More so, I had an amazing community. I lived in Fondren Southwest for 7 good years before I made aliyah. Slowly, I formed a really amazing core group of friends that I knew that I could count on. After my bipolar diagnosis, and after I went through some really horrible times, I had people that could support me, hold me up, and that I could talk with openly and freely. Almost all of my family is in the States, and I could always just get in my truck and start driving if I needed to. Now, I have to play WhatsApp tag with my dad because of a nine-hour time difference. I found out today that it’s easier for me to get to the southernmost point of Africa than it is for me to get back to my family.

So why the f**k am I here?

Strangely enough, it’s because of tomorrow. For all of the insanity, the balagan, it’s going to be tomorrow and the weeks to come, I came here to this country for tomorrow. I left behind my old life, my family, my friends, the country I was born in and still love because tomorrow I get to vote in the elections for the twenty-second Knesset of the State of Israel. After shacharit, morning prayers, I will walk down the street to a yeshiva, go into the voting booth, pick my little piece of paper, put it in the envelope, and put in a box with the rest of the votes of my neighbours.

You’re probably asking yourself, what the hell is so special about putting a piece of paper in a box that made you give up your prosperous life in America for a risky, slightly dangerous, expensive, crazy, dysfunctional, almost-insane place like Israel. Well, to me, it’s obviously more than just a tiny piece of paper.

In America, I was the Jewish guy, the one guy who kept kosher. If I saw another guy with a kippah on his head, I immediately tried to figure out if I knew him from somewhere. I knew every kosher restaurant, and their owners too. We had a handful of Orthodox synagogues in a city of millions, and I knew where each one was and when they had prayers. Now, I live in a city with so many kosher restaurants I am constantly learning about new ones, and that is just in my city. It’s not just me that wears a kippah, it’s the guy working at the grocery store, the janitor, the policeman, the bus driver, the soldier, the guy at the post office, the government minister. It’s the Prime Minister of my country wearing a kippah at the Kotel, at a synagogue, and wearing it openly and proudly. There are more synagogues within walking distance of my apartment than there are in the entire city of Houston, and I would guess that there are more in a 30 minute driving radius than in the entire state of Texas

It’s more than just than the external though. When I was living in chutz l’aretz, outside the Land of Israel, when I was in my synagogue, and I was praying, I prayed for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of David. I prayed for the Ingathering of the Exiles. I prayed for the resumption of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. I still pray for those things, but now I pray for my government to become the Kingdom of David. I pray that those in galut, in exile, join me in Israel. When I pray for the State, I pray for a Jewish State and that my brothers and sisters should come home. I used to pray that I could be in Israel, and now I’m actually here. For two thousand years, Jews have yearned to be here. They have prayed to return to Zion, countless numbers of our people died praying and hoping that they would one day see this place; and if not for them, then that their children would one day merit to see a Jewish state. After seeing Jewish life in America, I knew that the future of the Jewish people was in Israel, and not anywhere else. Generations have been lost to intermarriage, assimilation, and untold numbers of people don’t even know that they are Jews. Worse, sectors of American Jewry are eating themselves alive, either by demonising Israel and their connection to the land, or they openly embrace the path towards the dissolution of Jewish life in America. The story of Jewish life and the Jewish future is being written here, everywhere else I sadly believe is nearing the end of their chapters.

Here, you can live completely Jewishly without reservation. This is a place where we are on the forefront of everything to do with Jewish progress. We are asking here, for this first time in millennia, fundamental questions about what it means to be a completely independent Jew living in a Jewish state. It’s not always easy or clean, but it is the only place where these kinds of conversations can take place. You cannot talk about what it means to have a government that observes Shabbat in the United States. You cannot try to figure out how to deal with a mixing of Jews from around the world in the United Kingdom. You cannot deal with the implications of Jewish ethics and the army in France. Only here can we fully and unabashedly work out what it means to live in a completely Jewish society, while also respecting the rights of minorities here.

So tomorrow, when I vote, I will don my Shabbat clothing and say a Shehecheyanu, a blessing of thanks for an auspicious and special time. It’s worth writing it here in English to fully grasp what I mean. The blessing is: Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, Who has granted us life, sustains us, and enabled us to reach this occasion. I have but one life to live, and I want to live it to its maximum potential. I know that I can only do that here, in the State of Israel, and live my life Jewishly and without compromise. I can only explore my faith, my nationality, and my peoplehood to its fullest here. So, I will thank G-d tomorrow as I cast my vote, knowing that I will help shape the Jewish future, and the future of the world, with it.

At the end of the day, I want to be able to tell my, G-d willing, children and grandchildren that I gave up a golden land for this place. I will tell them that even though it was hard, and I missed my old life, there was no other place I would have rather lived. The only place that I could be was here, because here is the only place I can truly call home.

That is why I am here.

A Woman’s Cry and a Prayer from a Face

There is tension in this land, an undercurrent that I can feel in my daily walks around the city. In a place dominated by the most focused on conflict in the world, so many things in our regular lives go under the radar, only to be noticed by the occasional flare up or word that rings too harsh. All of my friends and family ask about the conflict with the Palestinians, whether I am scared of Hezbollah, what I think about Trump’s embassy move, or what I think about Bibi. Nobody on the outside sees the problems we try to ignore, the unglamorous sides of living in the holiest place in the world.

This blog is not about bashing Israel. I love this country. I gave up an amazing community, closeness to my family, the best friends a man could ask for, a steady income, and the support network I built for years; and I gave all of that up just to have hope in this place. People warned me that this was a hard land, and that it spits out people. They told me that you cannot live on idealism alone, that you had to harden yourself for everything this country would throw at you; but I can’t live like that. This blog will be my attempt to document and process what I see and feel around me, living as an oleh chadash, a new immigrant, and share with you both the beautiful and the horrible sides of living in my new home.

I was at Merkazit Hamifratz the other day, the main bus/train hub that connects Haifa with the Krayot, the suburban cities further to the north. I live in the Krayot, and stopping at this bus stop is part of my everyday commute. As usual, there was the afternoon crowd waiting to go home, all us of us lined up along the area where we wait for the metronit, the designated buses between the Krayot and Haifa. My Hebrew isn’t good enough for me to understand everything that goes on, but I didn’t need it to see what was happening in front of my eyes that day.

A crowd had formed around a few Ethiopians. Haifa is a mixed city, where Jews, Arabs (Christian and Muslim), and olim from around the world live. I could see a woman in traditional Ethiopian clothing yelling and crying, and a young man in a tee shirt with his back up against a wall, pinned by a bus official standing in front of him, the official’s arm outstretched with his hand against the wall. I have no idea what the argument was about, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Ethiopians here surrounded by angry crowds, and officials containing them. I looked at the young Ethiopian man. He couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. He was a tall guy; but the other man was even bigger. There was less than a foot separating their bodies, their faces, separating the powerful from the powerless. I could see the young man face away, with the same look I saw too often in the young African American men in similar situations in the states. The same look of defeat, of humiliation, of just wanting to get out of there. There’s a difference between the eyes of a man who’s resisting, a man who’s known what he’s done, and the look of a man who feels powerless. He had the look of a men robbed of agency, stripped of his humanity, surrounded by a crowd of people who only saw him as a potential, or inevitable, criminal. The same held true of the woman, she was like so many desperate faces I had seen back in the states. Mothers, grandmothers, givers, caretakers, women who wanted to protect but needed help, who were ignored, who were fought, who were distrusted because they looked different.

You can tell so much by the tone of a cry. I remember hearing a woman cry at the funeral of her three year old son, and I remember thinking that I had never heard anything so striking, so penetrating, so entirely filled with pain and frustration that all of her endeavours were for naught. This woman’s cry pierced me like her’s. Surrounded by angry strangers, in a place where she was supposed to be welcomed, instead feeling as foreign as an enemy in our midst. It was the cry of someone pleading for the help she deserved and receiving the treatment she expected. The endless struggle for equality only to be let down by the people that are supposed to be there to protect you. Her Hebrew switching to Amharic, and back again, trying to get someone to see what was wrong. There is nothing like hearing a woman’s cry of defeat and hopelessness, doing everything she can for people to see and actually listen to her.

In the middle of this month of Elul, a month of reflection, this will be the moment I reflect on. Every day we blow the shofar to wake up our souls to return, to prepare ourselves for the King to judge us as worthy or lacking. That woman’s cry was more powerful than any burst from a ram’s horn that I have ever heard, and the look on that young man’s face said more to me than any penitential prayer has ever spoken to me. They were my call from heaven to pay attention to those around me, and to fight for what is truly important in this land. Not that we should build on every inch of it, or that we should be so strong that our enemies tremble at the mention of our swords, but that no mother and no son should live among their own people and feel like a stranger. That we lost our Temples because we hated each other with out reason, that we burned our stores while the Romans were at the gates.

Our country prides itself on being a beacon of hope to a wandering people, a shelter to a nation hunted and pursued, and as a model for the future of a people reborn from the ashes. All of those hopes and dreams brought me here, but that woman’s cry keeps me here; that young man’s closed eyes and fear tell me to that there is work to be done. They told me when I came here that life would be hard, that you can’t eat Zionism. I’ll tell you something more: you can’t keep this place alive with just Zionism, you need the love that the harshness of this land often robs us of. You need the love of the widows, of the orphans, of the strangers. You need the love of a father and mother to their children, and the children for them. You need to see the men and women standing next to you as more than religious, secular, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Russian, gay, straight, or whatever. They are our family, no matter how distant. Don’t just listen this month to the shofars and the lectures about what you need to do, listen out to the cries for help from those around us. I am no prophet, no sage, no rabbi, but I believe that G-d’s call comes through his people, and not just through an animal’s horn. Listen, see what you can do, and then fix this world. Make the connection between one another, and let that connection flow towards the heavens. This is hard place to live in, let’s not make it worse by devouring ourselves from within. I was told once that you can never intuit what happens to a broad segment of a population from one event. It’s the same voice that told me that I can’t assign guilt from a section of a videotape, or from one part of a speech, or from one rash action by one person of authority; but we all know that’s not the truth. When we know that there is a history of persecution, when we know that the statistics point to discrimination, and when we hear countless people tell us, beg us, to see what is front of our eyes that anything else is to at best lie to oneself, and at worse to be cruel to the kind.

G-d willing, I will see that young man and that woman again, but with smiles. I hope to hear the special kind of laughter I hear between the Ethiopians here, a laughter filled with joy and happiness just to see one another. Their community has such warmth and love that its hard not to smile with them when I see friends surprisingly encounter one another on a bus. I want to see that young man standing tall and proud, the master of his own fate in his own country. I want that laughter to erase the memory of that cry, because until I hear it, I will feel unsettled in the land that I am supposed to transform with my presence. I fear that there will be an asterisk next to my name in the Book of Life, telling me that I still have work to do. I know that I only saw one moment, and that even this problem is immensely complicated, but I know that a little more love in the formula just might make a difference. Until then, I will think about those two men and women in this imperfect land, two people deserving more from a people aiming for salvation in what we believe is the center of the universe. Forgive me for the sin of not knowing enough to help then, it is a shortcoming I will not allow myself to repeat.